“Venerable Marx, if you lived in these lands
You would be quickly clean shaven and sent to a school for re-education.
The fact that even the cows from the East
Which grazed near the railway line
Now think that they are locomotives and stopped giving milk
Is a mistake put to your name.
It would be so good if the cities were ruled by merchants
So that the marketplace should not stink of so much rhetoric
Let free the brewers, the pastrami makers, the milkmen
Full of the dialectics of fermented hops
And of the hardened cheese.

For the time being the farmer would gladly come to scythe
The green sepia of the punks heads
For the time being, thinking that you are dead
The new philosophers get drunk on the idea that they polemicise with you.
They have not got the daring to smell the yeast which ferments
To blow up the society
And start the alembic
Through which
The revolutionary Cohn Bendit
Precipitated into an amiable mayor.

In fact even myself who am an ordinary character
I am coming out like a slug from the syntax and the logic
To dream up that stomach virus
Which makes one drunk on a piece of bread.
Come on, taste it
We are on the right course
In Berlin the clocks started to go haywire.”

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Mircea Dinescu: “THE METAPHYSICAL CAT” (“PISICA METAFIZICA”)

Poet’s NOTE:

Once upon a time, when we kept our sharp claws hidden in a velvet paw, an anonymous cat taught the Romanians a splendid lesson of Dignity: during a working visit on the Cathedral Hill in Bucharest, the “Most Beloved Son of the People”, accompanied by Raven, his favoured Labrador dog (Corbul – a present from the British Liberal party leader the Right Honourable the Lord David Steel of Aikwood, n.t.), descended from his official limo in order to admire the bulldozers inflicting a Hiroshima-like destruction to a historical residential neighborhood in downtown Bucharest. In the meantime a lone cat, which just lost its masters, was sitting on a pile of rubble, surveying like an omen the ruined housing estate, apparently defiant of the official visitor who just arrived.
At this point, Colonel Raven – because in those days all dogs belonging to the Comrade had grades, made a run for the ancient goddess, being encouraged to the task by its master. As it happened, just when action was meant to reach its climax, a lightning of claws emerged from the fur ball resulting in a fountain of blood and squeals. Uncle Nick flabbergasted by the shame inflicted on his gun dog, ordered his praetorian guard: “You catch that cat!”
In disdain, the culprit which was guilty of the punishable offence of undermining the national security, made itself scarce under a fallen fence and the lads sweated it out until late at night chasing up the illusory ghost of the cat, through the ossuary of a neighborhood, which only fourtyeight hours earlier was full of life and smelling the scent of lilac trees in bloom.
A few years later as a homage to this feline dissident teacher I wrote the following poem:

You catch that cat, shouted the Regent,
For it the Law can’t be so linient,
The foreign cat which does not give a dime
The Balkan cat, illegal and supine
Politically incorrect feline –
The hungry Balkan cat!
The metaphysics cat in search of trysts
Congenitally anti-communist
Consumerist who never tried alone
To strip a salmon fillet off the bone
Who never listened to the BBC
Who never went to Harrods for a spree.
How come that we inherited such cat?
Maybe from sermons of Adam Bhayat?
Or was it from some petty bourgeois gal
As surely not from the Neanderthal?
For Goodness’ sake do something with that cat!
Do kill it with a stroke of cricket bat
The Government will surely not complain
So long as it will not affect its gain
The bad-luck, idle cat and poor achiever
Which purrs and purrs whilst you all slog like beaver
Its languid manner shows its true disdain…
You Celtic ancestors, in overalls,
Do come and rescue us, heed our calls!

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PISICA METAFIZICA

Mircea DINESCU
(Gandul, II, nr.329, Bucharest, 30 Mai 2006)

Excise of Brutality; teh Destruction of the Historical centre of Bucharest by ceausescu, to make room for his Paraoh's project of the Biggest building in the World. Inhabitants were given 72 hours to move out before the bulldozeres moved in.